SCO Flip-Floppin’

As Karen points out, most of y’all don’t give shit one about the SCO situation. Okay, fair enough… go read about something that really matters.

Back in the day, SCO started this whole fiasco by basing its US$1B lawsuit on claims that IBM violated a trade secrets agreement [Forbes]. That was their foot in the door.

Recently, SCO added copyright violation to its list of charges against IBM [c|net], bringing the total lawsuit tally to over US$5B. This latest stab is taken even though Novell is suing SCO for copyright violations [Infoworld], and SCO is suing Novell for slander [c|net]… um… for claiming that Novell retains the copyright to Unix code originally purchased from AT&T… which it (Novell) later sold to some form of Caldera, which eventually mutated into SCO.

Jeebus. What a tangled mess. Oh! But, now… SCO is dropping its original claim against IBM (the trade secrets one) because they’ve been caught with their pants down [el Reg]. Basically:

SCO: Trade secrets violation! Money money money!IBM: Yeah? Prove it.SCO: Oh, we will. We have over 1 million lines of code that prove it.IBM: Yeah? Show us.SCO: Oh, we will in court.[in court]IBM: Judge, SCO hasn’t shown dick.SCO: Yes we have. We’ve ignored court orders to provide the 1 million lines of code, instead showing you almost 4 thousand.IBM: Isn’t that perjury or contempt or something?SCO: Shit, nevermind with that insignificant trade secrets stuff… lets move over to copyright infringement. Money money money!

While that may appear to be a classic bait-and-switch tactic, I see it as further evidence that SCO’s claims against IBM (and everyone else) are full of shit, and that they’ll do anything to make money without actually having to do anything or make a product. The investors seem to be smartening up on this whole thing, too [el Reg].

Please note and fully appreciate the new post category, “Fuck SCO”, for the year 2004. An homage to myself. How narcissistic.